We are excited to announce that Sugar 6.5 has entered Release Candidate testing. This is a big release for us, with several enhancements to enhance the features and functionality of Sugar, as well as set the groundwork for the future of the Sugar platform. Just check out the small list of what’s in there:

• Built in Full Text Search engine with support for using elasticsearch for the commercial editions.
• An updated User Experience, with a new navigation bar for the commercial editions, as well as cleaned up buttons and widgets for all editions
• Phase 2 of updating the Calendar, with reoccurring meetings and the ability to subscribe to iCal calendars ( thanks to the iCal Patch SugarForge project )
• Many performance improvements with SNIP, Sugar Logic, and the platform in general

You can grab the packages or the code on GitHub to check it all out. And if you at SugarCon this week, be sure to stop by the Sugar Smarties Bar and the SugarUNCon to get your hands-on demo of all the changes.

As we’ve done in the past, we’ll be highlighting some of the new developer level changes coming in 6.5 over the next few weeks leading up to the GA release in June. And be sure to give us any feedback you have on 6.5 in the comments below.

Last Week we announced the general availability of SugarCRM 6.2.3, which provided nearly 200 bug fixes to help improve the stability, security, and performance of the Sugar 6.2 series. As always, we recommend all users to upgrade to this version as soon as possible.

We also announced that Sugar 6.3 has entered Release Candidate stage, which means the application is getting very close to a stable release. Once great part about the RC process is that you can upgrade safely to any RC version and still upgrade to later RCs or the final GA version when it comes out in November. This allows you to do more real world testing of the upcoming features and functionality and provide any feedback for last minute show stopper bugs you are encountering. Be sure to report any issues you are seeing to the SugarCRM Bug Tracker so we can try to address them quickly before the final GA release. And keep an eye on this blog for more interesting bits of the upcoming features and functionality coming in Sugar 6.3.

Last week we released Sugar 6.2.2, which contains lots of security and bug fixes found in previous versions of Sugar. In addition, we also made some more substantial under-the-hood changes, namely:

• IE 9 support
• FF 6 support
• Upgraded YUI 2 to version 2.9.0 and YUI 3 to 3.3.0
• Upgraded TinyMCE to 3.4.2

Definitely everyone out there using any previous version of Sugar should update their instance as soon as possible. Grab the latest packages here.

I think one of the best parts about the SugarCRM community is how global it is. On a weekly basis, I’m interacting with people not only from inside the United States, but from across 6 different continents with different backgrounds than my own. I really enjoy this part of my duties as community manager, as a I can bring the needs, feedback, and struggles of all those users and developers from around the world back into the project for the betterment of everyone. As Sugar Community member Greg Soper reminds me of the aphorism ”a rising tide lifts all boats”, I feel in the end we are all in this same sea together, trying to make ourselves and the organizations we work with more successful every day.

But often times, there deserves to be a good ole’ “pat on the back” to those in the community which are making a huge impact on the product. I really want to reach out to those in Europe who have been members of the Open+ Developer community and thru it have made great contributions to the product to make it the success that it is today.

• Cedric Mourizard of Synolia, a French Gold Partner, who for all intents and purposes was the pioneer in helping us develop the program at the beginning of this year and leads all partners in code contributions in the product. Cedric and the whole team at Synolia were behind several recent features in Sugar, including the Twitter connector in 6.1, adding functionality for module tabs and for the Activity Stream in 6.2, and upcoming in 6.3 ACLs on Mass Update. This is in addition to the many bug fixes provided across 6.1, 6.2, and 6.3 to fix problems and enhance the customizability of the platform as a whole. Synolia is one of our oldest partners, and has been a huge supporter of SugarCRM in France.
• Fabio Grande of Poker SpA, an Italian Bronze Partner, who is a new entrant into the program but has made a huge impact in such a short time. He spoke at SugarCon this past April as his first foray into the community and then this spring began flooding us with many great bug fixes and features you’ll see coming in 6.2 maintenance releases over the coming months, as well as some features coming in 6.4 early next year. He was also the grand prize winner in June’s SugarCRM Bug fix contest
• Diogo Cabral of DRI, a Portugese Gold Partner, who has been a bit in the background but consistently providing great feedback and contributions to the program. They are a unique in that they purely develop using SugarCRM as a platform, and I really look forward to seeing more contributions and participation in the program coming from them over time.

A big thank you to these fine people and the teams of developers they work with, as they are driving the Open+ Developer Program to be a great success.

Would you like to be one of these “rock stars” ( pardon the cliche )? We are holding one of our famous SugarCRM Code Sprint events this October at our offices in Munich, Germany, and would love to see new faces who want to be part of this fine group of developers and help build and strengthen the Sugar platform. Space is limited, but you can apply to attend by filling out this form before September 5th, and we will notify those chosen shortly after that. And if you can’t make it to Munich but would still like to be part of a future code sprint, let us know in the comments or on Twitter and we’ll be sure to let you know when the next one is coming up.

You most likely have noticed a few changes that have happened recently to the forums and SugarForge, namely:

• New user posts are under moderation until they reach 10 posts, as well as disabling private messaging and signatures for them
• Removal of the captcha used for forums posts
• Signatures in the forums can no longer contain URLs, HTML, or PHP code
• The forums and tracker features for projects in SugarForge are disabled

We didn’t want to have to make these changes, but with the volume of spam that has been coming in and the difficulty in preventing it, we needed to do this to prevent the proliferation content and links to spam, illicit, and illegal materials from degrading our web properties. This is still an ongoing process, and we expect to make more changes in the short term to help offset any additional spam threats, but more importantly to help enhance the user experience for everyone who is a valued member of the Sugar Community.

I truly appreciate your understanding during this process. Don’t hesitate to contact me directly at jmertic at sugarcrm dot com or DM us on Twitter with any suggestions or feedback you may have. In addition, we will set aside some time in next week’s Community Webinar to discuss this as well.

We are excited to announce that the first beta of Sugar 6.3.0 is out. This is shaping up to be a great release, with several enhancements that will benefit all users, such as :

• Redesigned Importing module, including an API to enable importing from external services
• The ability to rename an entire module easily from one place ( avoiding the hunting an pecking thru the language files to change all of the locations by hand )
• Configurable Activity copying handling for Lead Conversion
• More customization hooks available with additions to the Ext framework
• A new ACL addition for controlling having the Mass Update feature available to a user ( thanks to Cedric at Synolia for this contribution )
• Significant speed improvements thanks to an AJAXified UI
• Ability to use Sugar Logic with related module fields ( commercial editions only )
• Quick Edit screen for making it easier to edit records without having a full screen refresh ( commercial editions only )
• Ability to import contacts from Google Contacts ( commercial editions only )

We’ll have the development team behind 6.3 detailing much of these changes and more over the next few weeks. In the meantime, download 6.3.0beta1 or grab the source from GitHub, and look forward to a bug hunt fest in the coming weeks.

We finished up the first ever Sugar Community Bug Contest last month, and I must say it was quite a success. The contest brought in over 25 bug fixes in the areas of upgrade-safe customizations, user interface fit and finish, and additional functionality to the core product. The fixes that came in will be part the upcoming 6.2.3 and 6.2.4 release, as well as several features targeted towards 6.5. Thanks to all who contributed and participated in the contest!

And with no further ado, here are the winners of the contest:

1st place ( and iPad winner ) – Fabio Grande, who is a developer for Poker SpA, an Italian bronze partner and spoke this past April at SugarCon

2nd place ( $200 Apple gift card winner ) - Jason Eggers, a prolific Sugar Community member who has built such notable addons such as SecuritySuite and Auto Refresh Dashlets ( which was included as a part of Sugar 6.2 )

3rd place ( $200 Apple gift card winner – Matt Poer, lead developer for Profiling Solutions, an Atlanta based gold partner.

Thanks to everyone who has participated in the contest and congratulations to the winners!

As posted earlier, SugarCRM will be big at OSCON this year. But now we are getting even bigger, with the launch of a new book, “Building on SugarCRM: Creating Applications the Easy Way”, published by O’Reilly.

For those of you who hold my earlier book “The Definitive Guide to SugarCRM: Better Business Applications” close to your heart ( or your desk ) this book will not disappoint, as it will take on the practical side of actually building an application using SugarCRM, showing how to use the latest features of Studio, Module Builder, Sugar Logic, and Web Services to easily build an application to power your organization. And with the shorter eBook format, it makes it a very approachable guide to navigating this task, enabling any developer to use SugarCRM to build custom applications.

So what’s the OSCON connection you may ask. Well not only is it being released at OSCON, but every attendee at OSCON will get a free eBook copy of the book, and everyone who attends the Tuesday tutorial session “Building An Application On The SugarCRM Platform” that I am presenting will receive a paperback copy as well. This session is free to all attendees at OSCON ( even if you just have the exhibit hall pass ) so definitely be sure to be there to learn how to build on the SugarCRM platform. I’ll be around all week at OSCON, including at the SugarCRM booth, so please stop by and say “Hi” as I look forward to meeting other Sugar Community members there.

Next month SugarCRM is going big at OSCON, the O’Reilly Open Source Convention in Portland, OR. And I mean really big; just take a look at what we are going to be doing:

• We’ll be the Platinum Sponsor at OSCON for the first time ever, continuing our increased presence at developer and open source events.
• We’ll have a giant booth in the expo hall, where you can meet several of our engineers and learn more about why this is the coolest company to work for.
• I’ll be doing a tutorial session on Tuesday afternoon in room D133 entitled ‘Building an application on the SugarCRM platform‘ where I’ll be talking about using SugarCRM as a platform for application development, showing off an app built using the platform and how it was done. This will be free of charge to attend for anyone with an OSCON badge.
• I’ll also be doing a normal session talk on Thursday afternoon entitled ‘Making Your PHP Application Easy to Customize‘, which I’ll talk about the various strategies for make PHP apps more customizable, drawing from our experiences building SugarCRM.

I am very excited to see us with a huge presence at OSCON, it is one of the premier events in open source worldwide and a great opportunity to meet and interact with people across open source communities. It’s a fun experience that I’ve had the pleasure of being a part of for the 4th time ( and 2nd time as a speaker ) and one that always leaves me insipired to build great things.

Want to join in the fun? Register at https://en.oreilly.com/oscon2011/public/register and enter in discount code Mertic for 20% off your registration costs. I hope to see you there!

We last week announced the general availability of the Sugar 6 Spring Release ( also known as Sugar 6.2 ). This release came with some pretty impressive changes to the core product, added mobile and integration features, as well as the new Corporate and Ultimate editions, and much much more.

Sugar 6.2 also marks the first release where we’ve begun to integrate development from our partner and community developers back into the main product. While we’ve always been open to contributions to the product, we begun a concentrated effort over the last 9 months to make it part of our culture. We’ve begun opening up our development process to our partner developers, holding two successful code sprints that has enabled us to more easily indentify and resolve the problems coming up out in the field. And we’ve begun to extend this out to the community at large as well, bringing their expertise back into the fold and giving them the opportunity to help shape our future. These steps are just the beginning of a long term vision to help grow the community, and make it stronger and more beneficial to everyone involved.

As for Sugar 6.2, here’s a small snapshot of how the community made it happen.

• A few features contributed by our community, namely:
  • Auto-refreshing of dashlets ( thanks to Jason Eggers ( eggsurplus ) )
  • Removing the hardcoding of the maximum number of tabs that can be show ( thanks to Cedric Mourizard of Synolia )
  • Add a favorites filter for the Activity Stream ( thanks to Cedric Mourizard of Synolia )
• Over 50 bug fixes contributed by our partner and community developers
• Nearly 20 bug fixes reported from the community during our beta and RC cycles that have been addressed in the GA version

I want to extend a big thank you to everyone in the community who has participated in this release. You are the reason why SugarCRM is the success it is today!